“Colors! Vibrant, swirling colours of blue, fuchsia, yellow, and green!” – Jane A. “The beans are almost done.” – @edgar_mindfulness “When I start meditating, I see my entire body on the top of a very tall mountain looking at a canyon. It’s a very peaceful place.” – Patricia V. “Most often it’s things that I have not yet accepted.” – @ckdaddy72 “Little mini movies of worry, usually involving my adult children....

Resources for Integrative Health Care: Check out these authors, organizations, and videos for more ways to treat your body (and mind) right. Chronic Pain: How to Hurt a Little Less: When we become patients, we experience greater pain and limitation, but how we respond can make all the difference, says Susan Bauer-Wu. Barry Boyce reports. Healing the Whole Person: It’s caring, it’s cost-effective, and it works. Is integrative medicine the future of health care?...

Meditation Teacher Sharon Salzberg Talks About the Power of Loving-Kindness Founding editor Barry Boyce talks with his dear friend Sharon Salzberg about attention, resilience, anger, and the need to be kinder to ourselves and the world. Excerpt from Sharon Salzberg’s upcoming book Real Change In this excerpt from her forthcoming book, Real Change, Sharon Salzberg explores how compassion and loving-kindness can both soften and strengthen us. What It Means to Have Clear Vision by Rich Fernandez Learn about how connecting with your purpose can help you to thrive—and explore three key ways to assess if you are aligned with your purpose or not....

Instead of being overwhelmed or exhausted by the many demands of the holidays, you can take a different approach—one involving more “being” and less “doing”. The results could mean you connect more fully with your holiday experiences, and your life in general, and you begin to feel more alive and present. We human beings have within us the capacity for deep calm and ease, and an awareness that reflects accurately what is happening in the present moment....

Whatever you’re feeling, we hope you make room for kindness—toward all those you encounter today and most especially toward yourself. Whatever you may be dealing with, in addition to the natural uncertainty about the future any election brings, may you extend grace to yourself today, and to those you meet. Here are some simple mindfulness practices to help you through the day. Mindful Practices for Election Day Return to your breath in moments of stress: The deepest healing occurs when you come to terms with the way things are....

In part two of this series, we explored the importance of cross-training to build mental fitness by combining daily exercise with additional mental fitness activities that cultivate calm and build awareness and clarity like mindfulness and breath practices. We also briefly introduced the idea of learning how the gut and brain communicate, which is what we’ll explore more deeply in this article. The Gut-Brain Axis The gut-brain axis is the “phone line” between your gut and your brain....

Skillfully drawing on neurobiology, mindfulness teachings, and psychotherapy, De La Rosa acknowledges that suffering is caused by a multitude of factors: from the systemic, like racism, ableism, homophobia, and economic disempowerment, to the personal—dysfunctional upbringings, traumatic losses, physical and mental health struggles. Having faced some of these himself, he doesn’t negate their importance in our lives, nor claim we should just get over them. Instead he empowers us, through direct and insightful prose, to touch in with these parts of ourselves that hurt....

5 Gratitude Meditations to Fill Your Heart with the Joy of Giving Thanks 1) A 10-Minute Gratitude Meditation to Notice, Shift, and Rewire Your Brain 2) A 12-Minute Meditation to Cultivate Gratitude for Small Things 3) A 5-Minute Gratitude Meditation: Savor the Moment by Tapping into Your Senses 4) A 12-Minute Meditation to Cultivate Embodied Gratitude 5) A 20-Minute Loving-Kindness Gratitude Meditation read more Elaine Smookler December 20, 2022 Mindful Staff September 21, 2022...

But things are changing! There is an evolution afoot as more men are starting to see the benefits of integrating mindfulness into daily life. If you’re a man or you know one, here are five reasons why I think men should give mindfulness a try. Increase Focus: George Mumford taught the Chicago Bulls and the Lakers mindfulness en route to their string of championships. Sports psychologist Michael Gervais stepped in to the Seattle Seahawks locker room and taught them mindfulness giving them a boost to their first Super bowl victory....

Fortunately, there are ways to make saying “no” feel less uncomfortable. Below are research-based strategies for saying “no” (without ruffling too many feathers) in five different situations. 1: You’re asked to work late, but you had been planning to take some time for yourself, like by getting outside for a walk with your dog. It’s hardest to decline a request when our reasons for doing so are vague, abstract, or seemingly unimportant—especially if we have to give our excuse face-to-face....

That’s uplifting, says Emma Seppala, associate director of the Center for Compassion and Altruism Research and Education at Stanford University. But she says these blogs are missing one key ingredient. Facts. “A lot of those articles are intuitively true, but because of my science background, I always look at an article like that and think, ground this in some data!” says Seppala, laughing. “I can’t take it as seriously.” Seppala has engaged her science background to create Fulfillment Daily, a blog that chronicles scientific data on well-being, focus, compassion, and meditation—with practical takeaways for readers....

It’s easy when people say they are angry or sad or excited, or if they tack an emoji to the end of a text. But when they don’t? Given that even face-to-face communication can be confusing, it should not surprise us that truncated, dashed-off text messages can result in disastrous misunderstandings. How do we know what a person is feeling when they don’t tell us? Here are six tips to help you better detect emotions in text messages—or, failing that, prevent yourself from jumping to conclusions based on scant evidence....

Mindfulness may be able to help with that change. It can be a complementary part of broad, comprehensive transformation. Police have been telling Mindful for years that a few things are missing in their training and preparedness. For example, one thing that would help police de-escalate encounters would be methods for regulating stress based on an understanding of how stress operates in the body and mind. Also, many mindfulness teachers focus on uncovering and working with our implicit bias, which if left unexplored can have tragic consequences....

With welcoming comes the ability to work with what is present and what is unpleasant. After a while, we begin to discover that our happiness isn’t determined simply by what is external in our life but also what is internal. To be open means to embrace paradox and contradiction; it’s about keeping our minds and hearts available to new information, letting ourselves be informed by life. Openness welcomes the good times and the bad times as equally valid experiences....

To help you stay centered, below is a short meditation to listen to before or after. It was created by Stefanie Goldstein, mom, psychologist, mindfulness teacher and co-founder of the Center for Mindful Living in LA. Find a comfortable position, and take a few long slow deep breaths. 2) Allow your belly to fill completely with every inhale and and deflate completely with every exhale. Bring your awareness to this breath, to this body, to this moment....

Couples diagnosed with unexplained infertility are typically active, health-conscious people of childbearing age who find themselves—for no apparent reason—without a crib or a bottle in the house. Like many, the Brindises followed a familiar route, first consulting doctors who recommended hormone treatment, which Stacy reluctantly decided to try. The arduous six-cycle program involved daily medications, self-administered hormone shots, and monthly intrauterine insemination with a catheter. But the Brindises still couldn’t get pregnant....

When we’re identified with any of the various forms of the conditioned mind, who we perceive ourselves to be feels solid, fixed, even permanent. When we’re identified, it leads not only to treating ourselves in a particular way but also to treating others in a particular way. The conditioned mind is quick to grab onto ideas and beliefs as if they’re unshakable, as if they are reality. In this grabbing we lose the remembrance of who we truly are....